


And Somewhere Else The Tea's Getting Cold

by Menoetius



Category: Silent Witness (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Modern Era, Moving On, Romance, Starting Over
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:29:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29086887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menoetius/pseuds/Menoetius
Summary: It's been four years since Leo Dalton's wife and daughter were killed in what had appeared to be a hit and run. The fraud gang whose members were responsible for their deaths has finally been brought to some kind of justice, and a combination of some well-meaning bullying from his in-laws and a well-timed job advert have brought him to the conclusion that it's time for him to move on with his life.Or, what might have happened if Leo had never moved to London?*"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold."
Relationships: Harry Cunningham/Leo Dalton, Leo Dalton/Theresa Dalton
Comments: 5
Kudos: 4





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Title stolen from Doctor Who.

Leo Dalton was forty-four years old when he reached the conclusion that if he wanted to do anything with the rest of his life, he needed to get out of Sheffield.

He had lived in Sheffield for the whole of his adult life. He had been born just a few miles away in the village of Ecclesfield, and when he was eleven he had started travelling into the city proper every day. There was no question of the Daltons being able to afford private education for their children, but they thought there would be more opportunities available to them at a city comprehensive than there were at the village schools, and they happily scraped together the bus fares, first for his older sister, and, two years later, for Leo.

He met Theresa McIlwaine when she was in the sixth form. She was part of his sister's gang, or else, Leo knew, she would have been far too cool to consider a mere fourth-former worthy of her attention. As it was, they got to know each other a little, meeting in the narrow hallway of the Daltons' old farmhouse whenever Theresa dropped by to pick up Catherine for one of their nights out in the city. He thought himself to be in love with her, but knew that she thought of him only as Catherine's kid brother. When she got her place at Cambridge to read History, he said goodbye to her with a painful wrench and a kiss on the cheek that left her startled and laughing.

His crush faded over the next few years, as teenage crushes do. He took sciences in his A-levels, and was offered places in Oxford and Edinburgh to read Medicine, but, with his mother's health beginning to fail, he took up his offer from Sheffield University and used his grant to rent a small shared house in the city centre. He would be close enough to Ecclesfield to visit home whenever he was needed, but he would have the independence that he had begun to crave.

And free from the constraints of the village bus for the first time in his life, Leo played as hard as he worked. He was popular with his lecturers, who valued his intelligence and the fact that he was quick to speak up in class. He was popular with his classmates, who thought that he was willing to lend notes and a good laugh after a couple of pints and a fiend on the pool table. He had his first kiss in the Student Union bar. He had his first girlfriend by Christmas, and his first break-up by Easter. He played rugby, badly. He was interested in anatomy, and thought he might like to be a surgeon.

He found friends among his classmates. He even found a best friend, of the kind that he had never had at school, and amid the stress and drama of second-year exams they kissed for the first time one night when the two of them were alone in the library. He put off the rising anxiety until he was through the exams, but in the early weeks of his third year, he sneaked into a freshers' week meeting and found a word for what he was.

Bisexual.

In his third year, too, he took an elective in the pathology department and was surprised by how much he enjoyed it. At the end of his six weeks, the professor in the department told him that he could have a talent for it. His friends laughed and called him morbid and creepy, but his fascination with the methodical work and the puzzle-solving possibilities grew.

He dated girls and boys indiscriminately, never seriously and never for long.

His tight-knit group of friends scattered to all corners of the country after graduation, off to pursue training.

Leo stayed in Sheffield. He had secured a job at the Northern General Hospital and a flatshare in the nearby hospital accommodation with two other new junior doctors. The work was fulfilling but exhausting, sometimes terrifying, and at the end of each day he had no energy to do anything other than to collapse into bed.

It was a sunny evening in April when he met Theresa again. He had left work in daylight hours for the first time in a week, and had been pondering the merits of trying to scrape together a meal from the contents of the fridge versus walking to the Indian takeaway that had opened a few streets over, and she had been sitting on his doorstep. He had almost trodden on her.

After they had done three rounds of apologising to one another and after they had established that she wasn't an unlikely burglar but rather the sister of one of his flatmates, she had looked properly at him and had exclaimed, "It is Leo Dalton, isn't it?" She had smiled brightly, and added: "Gosh, look at you, all grown up!"

At their wedding, a year later, Leo's sister had cried and Leo's new brother-in-law had toasted the lacerated spleen that had kept him from leaving work in time to take Theresa out for what had been their planned dinner that evening.

They had moved into a tiny bedsit and had lived on beans and coffee. Theresa had moved back to Sheffield after taking her degree and a teaching qualification, and had begun work in the secondary school where she and Leo had first met. Leo got a job as a junior histopathologist and began to take postgraduate exams. They wanted children, and were devastated when several years and repeated attempts all proved unsuccessful: eleven months after they had both all but given up, the appearance of Cassie, six pounds and ten ounces with a mop of dark hair and an astonishingly powerful set of lungs, was a miraculous surprise. Theresa and Leo agreed that their small family of three was perfect, and they were all deliriously happy.

And their lives had been deliriously happy for fourteen years.

Until, one day at the end of the school holidays, when Leo was at work and Theresa and Cassie had made plans for lunch and back-to-school shopping.

It had all been over in the blink of an eye.


	2. Chapter 1

On a Tuesday afternoon at the beginning of March, Leo boarded the East Midlands train from Sheffield to St Pancras with a one-way ticket and a distinct sense of unreality about the whole thing.

There had been a leaving party for him at work on the previous Friday. He had resolutely refused any kind of proper "do", but the card and cake and alcohol-free fizz that had been arranged in the office by his secretary couldn't have been avoided without the appearance of outright rudeness. It had taken until the point of departure, but Leo had finally been able to acknowledge to himself that it was hardly his colleagues' fault that his last few years at the Hallamshire had been so desperately unhappy.

He had expected to feel regret, or grief, or guilt, at leaving Cassie and Theresa behind. He knew that it wasn't as if he was never coming back. He still had the house to sell, and the only things that had been packed up were the ones that he had been able to fit into the three suitcases and backpack that he hauled onto the train.

Still.

After he had squashed his belongings into the luggage rack and found a seat where he could watch the fields of Yorkshire roll by, he was surprised to realise that what he was feeling was relief.

*

The sense of relief only lasted for as long as it took for the taxi to drop him outside his AirBnB in Brent Cross.

"I didn’t think the listing mentioned cats," said Leo, shaking his landlord's hand. The scent of ammonia through the small hallway was overpowering and unmistakeable. 

"You're not allergic, are you?"

He shook his head.

"Well," said the man cheerfully, as if that was the end of the matter, and deftly stepped around two of the cats in question as he showed Leo the galley kitchen, the grubby shared bathroom, the hall cupboard where he was welcome to keep any of his things that wouldn't fit in his bedroom, and, finally, the bedroom itself. He opened the door a scant few inches and squeezed in, beaming at Leo. He looked as proud as any new father when he announced, "And this is you."

Leo peered around the door. There was clearly not space for the two of them and the double bed all to occupy the room at the same time. He tried to arrange his face into an expression of some kind of equanimity as he suggested that perhaps he had better get his things and get settled.

His landlord hovered while he struggled to get his luggage through the door.

"You're in town for a job, you said?" he asked.

Leo nodded.

"For some kind of secondment, is it?"

"No," said Leo. "I'm moving to London. I just needed a place to stay while I find somewhere to live."

"And you never said what it is that you do."

"I'm a forensic pathologist." Leo hoisted his backpack onto the bed and squeezed himself into the room, trying not to laugh at the fascinated revulsion on the man's face.

He closed the door and looked around at his miniscule living space, and scrubbed his hand across his face. He had planned to unpack his things, go for a walk and make sure he knew the way to the Tube and maybe find the closest grocery shop. There was no room for him to unpack his things and he wasn't sure he had the energy to think about shopping or cooking. He needed a drink.

By half past six, he had wrestled a clean shirt out of his suitcase and he was on the Northern Line heading for Central London.

*

He had travelled more or less on autopilot to Euston, and from there to the main gates of UCL. The streets were quieter than they would have been earlier in the afternoon, but far from empty – staff clearly keen to get home, teenagers streaming back onto campus dressed for a night at the Student Union, even the odd student looking as if they were heading for the library. He was gazing at the university buildings lit up at the night sky when a shoulder bumped into him, and he stumbled.

"I'm sorry," said the voice that belonged to the shoulder. Leo turned around to meet the gaze of a tall, good-looking man, bundled up against the early spring chill.

"My fault," said Leo. "I wasn't watching where I was going."

The stranger's eyes twinkled. "I'm sorry, anyway," he said, with a disarming smile. He added, politely, "Have a good night."

Leo shivered and pulled his coat more tightly closed, and turned away from the university. He would have plenty of time to stare at the campus in the months ahead, and he really did want that drink.

The first bar he looked into was full of students and music with a thudding bass line. They all looked barely Cassie's age. The second and third were no better. On his fourth attempt, he struck lucky. He ordered a pint and then leaned up against the bar, looking around with idle curiosity. The place was modern, but the music was muted and he hadn’t felt as if merely by stepping inside he'd raised the average age of the place by twenty years. There was a promising whiff of pub food, and he realised suddenly that he hadn't eaten since a sandwich on the train.

He had been there for less than five minutes when he noticed his handsome stranger sitting at a table and chatting animatedly with a blonde woman. He had shed his coat and scarf, and Leo didn't stop himself from noticing that he was even better looking under the bar lights than he had been in the dim glow of the streetlamp. He blushed, and turned around to resolutely study the short menu.

"Your first time in here?" asked the barman, as he was ringing up Leo's order.

"Yes," said Leo, surprised. "You get a lot of regulars, then?"

"Academics," he said. "A few of the universities are close by, and we don't attract the student crowd. We don't usually attract many tourists, either," he added, eyeing Leo.

"I'm not a tourist," said Leo. He handed over his credit card. "I'm just new in town. I put my head into a few of the bars near campus, but I couldn't deal with the – " He waved a hand and vocalised a bass line.

The barman laughed.

"Can I buy you a drink?" For the second time in an hour, a shoulder bumped up against Leo's and a voice made him jump. "You're the man I nearly knocked into a puddle," he said, unnecessarily, while Leo's mouth fell open.

"It's really not necessary."

"Still," he said. "I'd like to."

"Your girlfriend won't mind?" he managed, recalling the blonde girl.

He laughed. "She had to leave, and she is _not_ my girlfriend. Mike," he said, attracting the attention of the barman who had returned with Leo's card. "A drink for this gentleman, and a pint of the IPA for me, please."

"Leo," blurted Leo.

The stranger shook his hand. His grip was warm and firm, and Leo's mouth went dry. "It's nice to meet you, Leo" he said. "I'm Harry."

Harry squired their drinks and Leo himself to the small corner table that he'd been sitting at.

"You weren't waiting for anyone, were you?" asked Harry suddenly. "I haven't stolen you away from a date?

Leo laughed, the sound startled out of him. "No," he said. "I'm afraid you've rescued me from my tragic night of drinking alone."

"I heard you telling Mike that you were new in town," prompted Harry.

"I'm starting a new job," said Leo, and hoped that he wouldn't be asked to elaborate on that. He'd learned from the handful of blind dates that he'd been sent on in Sheffield by his well-meaning in-laws that discussing corpses would put an abrupt and awkward end to most conversations. This wasn’t a date, of course, he admonished himself. This was just being bought a drink by a man who plainly had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility towards people he had accidentally knocked into in the street.

"Did you move far?"

"From Sheffield." Leo grinned at the disconcerted look on Harry's face. "You're one of those people who never goes north of the Watford Gap, aren't you?"

"I wouldn't say _never_ ," said Harry.

By the time their food arrived, he knew that Harry had grown up in London and that his mum lived out in Surrey, now, and that his entire experience of the north was a family holiday to Blackpool when he was a child and a few trips to Edinburgh as a student. "Scotland doesn't count," Leo told him, his mouth full of chicken tikka and naan, and smiled when Harry laughed.

He told him about the small town he'd grown up in in South Yorkshire, and moving to Sheffield properly for university. He talked about the tribulations of having an older sister, and Harry countered with stories of pestering his parents for a little brother or at least a dog. Instead, he'd got a gerbil. They traded favourite films, and favourite music, and books you'd take to a desert island.

This wasn’t a date, he told himself again.

This was just meeting someone and – and _clicking_ , like he hadn't since -- well, since -- Leo shut that train of thought down, fast.

It had been seventeen years since he'd had to think about what his type was, but Harry was making him light up like a teenager with his first crush. He was chatty, and funny, and enthusiastic, and waved his hands when he talked, and he had a way of listening to Leo as if Leo was the most interesting thing in the room. Out of the coat and scarf that he had been wearing on the street, he was wearing a well-cut suit and a white shirt that highlighted the dark rasp of stubble across his jaw and neck. His eyes twinkled whenever they caught Leo's.

He was taken aback by the brush of a thumb against his lips.

"You had a bit of -- " Harry gestured, and licked away the smear of sauce that he had wiped from the corner of Leo's mouth.

Leo's heart was pounding.

So this wasn't a date, but maybe it was -- _something_. He tried to remember the last time he had gone home with someone he had met in a bar.

Harry was watching him. "Are you OK?" he asked, wary.

"Just admiring the view," Leo said honestly.

Harry relaxed and grinned. His eyes were fixed on Leo's, and Leo didn't look away. He swallowed and watched as Harry stood and leaned over the table, and leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. Leo's eyes closed involuntarily. The kiss was sweet and lingering, and he chased it blindly when Harry pulled back.

"Sorry," said Harry, sounding not at all. "I've been wanting to do that for the last hour and a half. Do you want to get out of here?"

"I -- " He hesitated.

"If I've been reading this wrong -- " Harry offered. He must have known that he hadn't been, but Leo appreciated the gesture.

"You haven't," said Leo. He reminded himself that moving to London had been supposed to be about starting his life over. He tore his eyes away from Harry's mouth, which he realised he had been staring at. "You _really_ haven't," he repeated. "But you know when I said I'd just moved to London?"

"How just?"

"Today," he confessed. "I took an AirBnB to give myself a chance to look for a place, and the guy I'm staying with has five cats and no sense of personal space and a spare room so small I think we'd have to take turns breathing."

Harry laughed. "Really?"

"But if you -- " Leo trailed off.

Harry curled his fingers around Leo's hand. "My place?"

*

Harry's flat was in a part of London that Leo didn't know. They had picked up a cab along the Marylebone Road, and for the first few minutes he had tried to follow the various turns and roundabouts and street signs, but he had quickly been distracted by Harry's fingers tracing patterns along his palms. The only thing he could say with any confidence was that at some point they had crossed to the south of the Thames.

He briefly spared a brain cell to hope that he would be able to find his way back to his own flat in the morning, and then they were through the door and their mouths were coming together and his hands were on Harry's belt and he decided that that could be tomorrow morning's problem.

*

Leo blinked awake in the dark of _very_ early morning, and couldn't remember where he was. The mattress was far more comfortable than he'd expected from his brief test out of it the previous day, and he took his time surfacing from what for a moment he thought had been a particularly good dream. It was only when he made to roll over and encountered warm flesh that he remembered -- not a dream, and not his rented mattress.

He smiled to himself in the dark, his memory coming back to him.

His nerves had briefly got the better of him -- _after_ he had fallen over his own jeans and landed on the mattress, and had turned over to find Harry's grinning face close to his -- and he had muttered, "It's been a while, Harry."

"With men?" Harry had asked.

"With anyone," Leo had admitted.

And then he had frozen, because that probably wasn't the sort of thing you told a man you had picked up in a bar, but it hadn't seemed to bother Harry, who had finished taking off his own shirt and then had crawled on top of Leo and proceeded to take him apart with his hands.

The sex had been unsettlingly good, even allowing for the fact that it had been four years since he had been touched by anything other than his own right hand. As he had been falling asleep, he had thought that he would really quite like to do it again. With Harry.

He looked down at Harry, whose features were barely lit by the thin slatted glow of the streetlamp filtering through his blinds. They had known each other for one night. Harry was gorgeous, and could have any man in London if he wanted, and probably did have. He told himself not to be ridiculous.

He reached out and grabbed for his watch. It was quarter past five in the morning. He supposed he had better make a move, if he wanted any hope at all of making it into work on time. As he slipped out of bed, he tried not to find it endearing when Harry tried to hang on to him in his sleep, but he didn't stop himself from kissing the top of his head and whispering, "It's early, go back to sleep."

Their clothes had ended up scattered piecemeal down the hallway, and he padded back and forth in bare feet. Harry plainly slept like the proverbial dead.

Or, at any rate, he did until Leo reached for a shoe, misjudged the angle, and sent a lamp crashing to the ground.

Harry jerked upright in bed as if a bomb had gone off.

"Harry?" he whispered.

"Leo?" Harry's voice was loud in the early morning silence.

"Yes." Leo kept his voice low. "I was trying not to wake you."

A light flipped on, and Harry blinked down at him, kneeling in the middle of the floor surrounded by bits of lamp.

"What are you _doing_?" asked Harry.

"I think I broke your lamp."

"I can see that. I meant -- " Harry made an expansive gesture. "It's still the middle of the night."

"It's half past five."

"Yeah, that's the middle of the night."

"I was going to wake you before I left," offered Leo, apologetically.

"Or," Harry suggested. "You could not leave?"

Leo's stomach flipped, and it was with genuine regret that he said, "Do you remember when I said I'd moved to London to start a new job?" He straightened up, a shattered lightbulb in his hand.

"Jesus, don’t – " Harry rooted around in his bedside table, and came up with an almost empty box of tissues. He held it out to Leo. "Here, before you cut your hands to shreds."

Leo dropped the lightbulb into the box with a look of gratitude, and then held his palms out to Harry for inspection. Harry kissed them.

Leo grinned.

Harry turned scarlet. "I've had about four hours sleep and no caffeine," he said. "You were saying."

"Right," said Leo. "I moved to London to start a new job."

"I remember."

"Well, my first day is in two and a half hours."

"Oh," said Harry, and offered: "You can help yourself to a shower and a clean shirt, if you want. If you play your cards right, there could even be coffee."

He smiled, and sat on the edge of the bed. Harry propped himself up on his elbows. As the sheet slid down, he saw a darkening bruise on Harry's collarbone and blushed, remembering putting it there. "I won't pretend that's not tempting," he said, looking away from Harry's bare chest. "But there's a few things back at the flat that I need to pick up before I go in. Listen, I -- " He hesitated.

"What?" asked Harry.

"Where am I?"

Harry laughed. "Battersea. I can get up and drive you home if you want."

"It's the middle of the night, don't be stupid," said Leo. "There's a bus stop or a Tube station around here somewhere, right?"

"Turn left out of the front door," said Harry. He gave Leo an assessing look. "That wasn't what you were going to ask, though."

He took a deep breath. "I was going to say that I don't really know what the etiquette is for when you try to sneak out of a guy's house at the crack of dawn, but I'd like to do this again sometime."

"This?" asked Harry, with a grin.

Leo snorted a laugh. "I had a really good time last night," he admitted.

Harry's grin seemed to melt a bit at the edges. "I did, too," he said.

When he looked down, Harry was holding out his phone, unlocked and open to a blank contact. He quickly added his name and number, and sent himself a dropped call. He handed the phone back to Harry, and found himself being reeled in and kissed quickly.

"Have a good first day at work, Leo Dalton," murmured Harry.

*

A few minutes later, Leo was letting himself out of Harry's front door and hurrying towards the Tube. He was smiling like an idiot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first two chapters of this have been sitting on my hard drive for a while and it was time to release it into the wild. I've got fairly complete notes on the next couple of chapters, and an outline of the rest of it, so I'm pretty sure it will get finished, but I make no promises at all as to _when_.
> 
> The rating may go up a bit.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point it will probably become obvious that this is set in a modern AU, in so much as its set in a pre/non-COVID modern day for no other reason than I couldn't deal with retconning the technology back to the early 2000s.

"Are you singing?"

Harry blinked and raised his head from the stack of books, papers, and laptop, and the coffee mug that he had balanced precariously on top of it all, and realised that he had, in fact, been singing under his breath.

Nikki was leaning against her desk, looking amused.

"How long have you been there?" he asked.

"Just a couple of minutes," she said, unrepentantly. "You're obscenely cheerful for not even eight o'clock in the morning."

He shrugged. He was aware that he couldn't seem to stop smiling.

She let it drop. "The new man starts today, doesn't he?"

"Really?" He checked the date on his computer screen. "I suppose so. I can't believe it's March already. You never told me what he's like."

"Well, it was nearly six months ago," she said. " He's from somewhere in the north – Leeds, maybe?" she said, doubtfully. "He seemed nice – polite, interested, didn't assume that Sam was a secretary. He was certainly the best qualified of the bunch, though. I can't actually remember his name, which I suppose is going to be embarrassing when I meet him again today."

Harry laughed, and changed the subject. "How was last night?"

"An open and shut domestic in Chiswick," she said. "I'll do the PM this afternoon, but the wife had confessed before I even arrived. Did you get home all right? I felt bad for ditching you."

"Oh -- " Harry waved a hand and tried to return to his work. "It's fine."

"No, but I was the one who said I needed to talk and I dragged you out when you said you were tired, and then I just ran off."

"You didn't just run off," he said, looking back up. "It's the job."

"Still – "

"Nikki, it's _fine_." He added: "I stayed and had a drink."

Her eyes narrowed. Harry fought the urge to duck his head back down to his desk. "Oh, my _God_ ," she said. He jerked backwards into his chair at the unexpected volume of her voice. "You met someone!"

"Yes, do shout it louder, by all means," he said, with a touch of acidity. "I think there are a couple of students in the Engineering Faculty who didn't quite hear you. And why are you so surprised that I've got a sex life?"

He hadn't exactly been celibate for the six years that Nikki had known him. Admittedly she had never met any of his partners, because they had never lasted beyond one night – either because it was a blind date, which was usually with a friend of a friend of Sam's and which had never not been a disaster, or because he had picked someone up at a bar and exchanged orgasms and _not_ exchanged phone numbers or last names or anything beyond the bare minimum of conversation.

He didn’t know what it meant that Leo Dalton had torn up his whole SOP, and without even really trying.

Nikki was still staring at him as if he were a particularly interesting specimen in the cutting room.

"What?" he asked.

"What was she like?"

"He was amazing."

Nikki spluttered.

Harry arched an eyebrow. "I'm bi," he reminded her, unnecessarily.

"I _know_ ," said Nikki. "But – "

"This is the main office," said Sam's voice, muffled. "You'll share it with the other two Readers in the department, who are both on the Home Office register too. They should both be in soon."

"Morning, Sam," called Nikki.

Sam's face looked through the glass panel in the door, and she opened it. "I didn't think you would be in yet."

"Morning, Sam," echoed Harry.

"Oh, you're both here," she said, pleased.

And she pushed the door open fully and ushered Leo Dalton into the room.

"Hi," said Nikki.

"You met Dr Nikki Alexander at your interview," said Sam. "And this is Dr Harry Cunningham. Harry, this is -- "

Harry stood up and grinned, unembarrassed – his heart had started up a tap-dance and an entirely colony of butterflies had just set up home in his stomach, but he wasn't _embarrassed_. "Dr Dalton, I presume," he said. 

"Dr Cunningham." Leo shook his hand and grinned back, eyes twinkling at Harry. "This is a very pleasant surprise."

"You two know each other?" said Sam, doubtfully. She would know, of course, that Leo had never worked in London, just as she knew that Harry viewed anything north of the M25 as the Dark Continent.

"We've met," said Harry.

"In the pub last night," said Leo, and they both laughed.

"Well," said Sam, looking delighted. "If the two of you are already friends, that certainly makes things easier."

Nikki choked on her coffee.

"Leo, the empty desk over there will be yours," Sam went on, oblivious. "I'll give you the rest of the tour, but you could drop your things here if you wanted." As Leo dropped his briefcase and coat on the bare desk, she added: "I'll give him back to the two of you later."

"I'm looking forward to working with you both," said Leo, eyes still on Harry.

"This room exits through here into the changing area and mortuary," said Sam, leading Leo out. "I'll show you the way in from the corridors later, but we'll go this way for now."

The door into the mortuary had barely clanged behind them before Nikki pounced on Harry.

"It was _him_ ," she said.

"Obviously."

"Are you going to see him again?"

Harry glared at her over his laptop screen. "Yes, evidently whether I want to or not."

"You know what I mean."

He remembered the way Leo had smiled when Harry had kissed his fingers, and the message that had been on his phone when he had got out of the shower that morning – just a sentence and a kiss – and how it had made him grin into his coffee, and the fact that apparently he had been singing cheesy nineties pop to himself at half seven in the morning in the office. Yes, of course he wanted. He didn't know who he thought he was trying to fool.

"Don't you have work to do?" he asked, instead.

"But – "

"End of conversation."

"Harry."

"End of conversation, or I shall punch you in the nose." He buried his blinding smile in his folders.

*

"Harry!"

He was in the middle of the corridor, caught in the mass exodus of students from class to their lunches, one arm halfway into his coat and trying to juggle his phone and wallet and car keys with the other hand. He tried to turn around and promptly dropped the whole lot.

"Here." Leo's fingers brushed Harry's palm as he straightened up and handed him back his things.

"Have you been called out on a case?"

"What?" Harry tore his gaze from Leo's, and realised that Sam was standing next to him. "Yes. Just a hit and run in Wandsworth. I shouldn't be gone too long."

"I wondered if you might take Leo with you. I'm sure he's had enough of glad-handing faculty and talking to IT by now, and it would good for him to see the lay of the land." She looked expectantly between the two of them. "Okay?"

"Yeah," said Harry. He shoved his phone in his pocket, and scratched the back of his neck. "This way, Dr Dalton."

Leo raised his eyebrows.

"We've got a bit of a drive," he went on, striding towards the entrance. Leo hurried to catch up with him. "It really doesn't sound like anything exciting," he said, almost apologetically. "They just want someone to take a look at the body before its moved."

"It'll be good for me to see some of London in the daylight," he said. "And, well, Professor Ryan wasn't wrong. If one more ancient white Etonian tells me that they're sure all sorts of valuable work must go on in the provinces, I might scream."

Harry grinned as he unlocked his car. "She won't let you get away with that for long, you know."

"What?"

"Professor Ryan."

"Yeah, speaking of." Leo slid into the passenger seat and looked meaningfully at Harry.

Harry dropped his head to the steering wheel and laughed. "I don't know why I did that."

"I know you know my first name. You certainly seemed to when – "

"Yes, all right!" Harry held up his hands in surrender, feeling the heat in the back of his neck and unable to stop the corners of his mouth turning up. "I'm not embarrassed by it, I swear. I just – I've never done this before."

Leo stayed quiet as Harry reversed out of his parking space and queued at the car park barrier, and, after they had turned onto Gower Street and settled into a stop-start stream of lunchtime traffic, he said, changing the subject, "Where did you say we were going?"

"Wandsworth." Harry swallowed, and launched into a monologue about which areas of the South East they covered, and the forensic group practices they shared jurisdiction with, and which detectives to avoid, and how to make the support staff like him. He had got as far as the details of how the on-call rota worked and had talked them to Vauxhall Cross when he cut himself off in the middle of a sentence. "And you know all this already, don't you?"

"I didn't know how the mortuary assistants took their coffee?" Leo offered.

"You're allowed to stop me when I prattle on."

He shrugged. "I like listening to you talk."

"I owe you an apology," said Harry. "For not telling you who I was or what I do."

"No, you don't," said Leo, easily. "I didn't tell you, either."

"I don't, generally," Harry admitted. "I don't know about where you come from, but here I'm not exactly tripping over handsome men who are good conversationalists with interesting taste in books and films and beer, who are – " They were stopped at a traffic light, and he glanced at Leo out of the corner of his eye. " – who are excellent kissers and _great_ in bed, let alone ones who also don't run screaming when you tell them that you're a forensic pathologist."

If he hadn't been in charge of a moving vehicle, he'd have closed his eyes and wished for the earth to swallow him up.

"No," he agreed, and his voice was laced with a surprising amount of affection. "I suppose not where I come from, either."

*

The remainder of Leo's day passed surprisingly quickly – the body had been a straightforward hit and run, but Harry had volunteered to hang back and let Leo take it, _"get your toes wet before Sam throws you in the deep end of the pool tomorrow"_. He supposed at more significant crime scenes, with officers who were familiar with the lab and the staff, he'd be recognised as new and could probably expect a certain amount of interrogation, but the traffic cop in Wandsworth hadn’t even known Harry. It had felt good to slip back into the familiar routine.

He and Nikki had been working quietly in the office for a couple of hours. At least, he supposed Nikki had been working, and at one point she had vanished briefly and come back with a coffee for him. He had been less productive: fighting with antiquated IT, trying to make sure that he had access to all the systems that Sam's secretary had told him he ought to, and trying to make sure that he'd actually get paid at the end of the month.

When the office door opened and Sam came through it in her coat and scarf, he was startled to see that it was dark outside.

"Are you both done for the day?" asked Sam.

Nikki checked her watch. "That rather depends," she said. "If we've had a call out, then, no, absolutely not, my paperwork is riveting and lives may depend on it."

"I thought we'd take Leo out for a drink to celebrate his first day."

"In that case, my paperwork is awful and I've been ready to abandon it for hours."

Leo laughed.

"Leo?" asked Sam. "I don't mean to presume that you don't have plans, but – "

"Well," said Leo. He tensed, and the excuse to beg off was ready on his lips before he remembered. This wasn’t Sheffield. The whole point of getting _out_ of Sheffield had been to –

Anyway, he thought he probably liked these people.

Well. He liked Harry, anyway, and Nikki had been friendly to him all afternoon, and Sam was just as intense as he'd remembered from his interview, but more than one person had accused Leo of being intense in his time, intense wasn't _bad_.

He forced his shoulders down from around his ears, and picked up his coat.

*

"Where are you living, Leo?" asked Nikki.

"I've got a room in Brent Cross."

Her forehead wrinkled. "I'm honestly not sure where that even is. Isn't there some kind of shopping centre?"

"The very top of the Northern Line," said Harry. He had made it to the pub nearly forty minutes after the rest of them, breathless and immediately dispatched back to the bar to get a round in as his penance. "It's practically in Scotland."

Leo snorted. "I'm a complete novice to London and to London public transport," he told them. "I wanted to be somewhere where I'd minimise my chances of getting lost on the way to work, at least in the beginning, and it was cheap and available."

"But?" prompted Harry, who had heard about Leo's morning on the drive back from Wandsworth.

Leo gave him a half-hearted glare. "It turns out that living in a tiny room and getting poked in the ribs by the loose springs in the mattress and surviving on Pot Noodles and only having hot water when the upstairs neighbours aren’t in the toilet feels a lot less romantic and noble at forty-four than it did when I was twenty-three. And then there's the five cats that I live with." And then added, in case it hadn't been clear: "They aren't my cats." Sam and Nikki looked horrified, so he said, "It's only an AirBnB, and it's only until I find somewhere else."

"Wait," said Sam, leaning forward. "Why are you staying in an AirBnB?"

"Because the rental market in London is a disaster," said Leo. "I decided it would be easier to find a proper rental once I was living here, and I'm sure it will be, but – " He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket, navigated to his RightMove app, and flipped it around to show her one of the listings he had found that morning while he was waiting for the Tube. The bedroom-cum-living area was so small he would be able to scramble eggs without getting out of bed, all for only £1200 per calendar month. He hadn't been able to decide whether that would be an improvement on his current living arrangements or not.

Sam and Nikki bent their heads together to look.

"They can't all be like this," said Sam, with an air of disbelief.

"They're pretty much all like that," he told her, shrugging.

"This is mad," said Nikki. She had pulled his phone closer and was flipping through the app, her eyes growing wider with each swipe of her finger.

"Well, you can't stay where you are," said Sam with an air of finality. "You can't, Leo. It sounds awful."

"You could just stay with me."

He turned to look at Harry so quickly he almost gave himself whiplash.

Sam looked delighted. "Oh, well, Leo. That sounds like a perfect solution."

"That's kind," he said, thinking of the flat in Battersea. He hadn't seen much of it, but it had been tidy and well-kept and there had been a refreshing lack of cats and it had had Harry in it. He had a small spasm of regret as he prepared to turn the offer down. "It's very kind, but – and, forgive me, but I haven't got a good way to phrase this – we aren't lesbians, Harry."

Harry choked on his drink. "I didn't mean – " he said. "I mean, I wasn't suggesting we should move in together, or – "

"You are, sort of," put in Nikki.

"Well, yes, I am," said Harry. "But – well, look, you can actually fit two people into my flat and you won't step in a litter tray in the night and I've got a functioning kitchen and there's a spare room if you, er, well – " He stumbled himself to a stop.

Nikki was sitting back in her chair and sipping her gin and tonic as if she hadn't had a better night's entertainment in months.

Leo ignored the way Harry's babble made his stomach flip and he said, carefully. "It feels like that has the potential to get very complicated."

To his left, Sam choked on her wine.

"Well, for a few days, anyway," Harry pressed. "If it's weird after that or if it turns out I'm a terrible flatmate, I promise I'll help you find somewhere else to stay. Sam's right, though – it can't be any worse than what you've got right now."

*

"We can go and get your stuff tomorrow," said Harry, who had been traitorously sober when he'd herded Leo into his passenger seat.

Leo tried to remember on what number drink he had allowed himself to be press-ganged into sleeping indefinitely in Harry's spare room, and had a funny feeling it had been barely halfway into his first.

Harry was still talking. "You can borrow a clean shirt and things in the morning, and I've got an extra toothbrush somewhere. You don't mind? I just feel like – he _knows_ you've just moved to London, and showing up at his doorstep at half ten at night with a strange man in tow and saying, thanks for the hospitality and all, but I'm moving in with this one instead is – well, I just think he might call the police. I know you said he's a bit weird, but even so. _I'd_ call the police."

Leo snorted with laughter. "It's fine," he said. "You're right. We'll sort it out in daylight."

They both fell silent. Harry watching the road, and Leo watching Harry.

A scant twenty minutes later, Harry was parking his car and they were entering the flat that Leo remembered from the previous night – weirdly familiar and comforting, even though he had spent barely six hours there.

At the end of a brief tour, Harry put his hand on the spare room doorknob.

"Listen," said Leo.

Harry interrupted him. "Of course," he murmured. "You don't actually _have_ to sleep in the spare room."


End file.
